Snogwarts: A Garden of
by SNOGWARTS
Summary: She infuses a little silly sweetness into his otherwise pragmatically sour existence.


A Garden of  
By Verbalklepto

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Pairing: Draco Malfoy / Ponoma Sprout (assigned by Goldfish945)  
Disclaimer: Take with a grain of salt. I'm appallingly subtle in my humor.

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Professor Sprout can coax a rose from concrete.

Draco heard a muggle refer to someone as a 'green thumb' once. He thinks that the term was invented for Professor Sprout. He watches her, evenings, when he tells Crabbe and Goyle that he has detention; instead, he stands over her shoulder and watches her small, calloused hands mold the roots, watches her gingerly move the bulbs from pot to pot. He listens to her soft, anxious voice as she speaks tenderly of the plants she watches over.

One night, she takes him to the back of the greenhouse and out a door he never knew existed. Outside sits a sprawling garden— her own, she says, not visible unless she allows it, and he hides the smile that unexpectedly threatens to appear—and in the center sits a huge flower upon a pedestal, with closed petals so dark that it's almost invisible against the night sky.

"What is it?" He asks as she stops in front of it.

Professor Sprout answers, but he's too distracted by the brilliance of her smile against her ruddy face, and the way her pale, narrow eyes light up. The tail end of her words, however, reach his reddening ears—"wait 'til you see."

"See what?"

"You'll see! You'll see!" she exclaims, clapping her hands together in front of her face and letting out a clear, sharp peal of laughter that at last forces his immovable face to smile. He wonders if he doesn't like her _because _she's so childish — his childhood was more like an adolescence, anyway, filled with stern reprimands and stinging hexes and forced seriousness rather than bright laughter and lollipops. She infuses a little silly sweetness into his otherwise pragmatically sour existence.

The flower blooms as the moon peaks out from behind the clouds, spreading the petals so that they extend onto the floor in scintillating, undulating waves that glow like captured starlight. Draco can't help but allow his grin to broaden — his life has been filled with so little beauty. His home is black and white and Spartan with grimacing busts and fierce statues. His parents smile but rarely, and words of praise and affection are few and far between. They love him, he knows, but there are so many things more important in their shadow-world than a hug —

"Isn't it lovely?" Professor Sprout asks, grinning from ear to ear. "It only comes out when —"

The moon disappears, and the flower closes up abruptly, withdrawing with Draco's rare smile.

"Oh, drat." She says, hands folding onto her hips as she turns to peer up at him. "I was hopin' you'd get to see it a tad longer."

"Why?" He doesn't know how to speak around her. He's good at sarcasm. He's an expert at insults. Being haughty and mean comes so easily to him — but he desperately wants to be nice to her, and so he bites back everything he'd otherwise say.

"You've been such a good pupil this year, Mr. Malfoy. And I know that the other Professors have so much trouble with you... I just want you to know that I appreciate your behavior, even if I don't understand it."

"I like school." Draco says with a shrug, adjusting the front of his robes.

"You absolutely do not!"

"I like your class, then."

"Mr. Malfoy, honestly..." Professor Sprout titters daintily.

"Maybe I just like you."

Pause.

"Why aren't you so sweet for your other teachers, hm?" She asks quietly, reaching up and patting his cheek with the palm of her hand.

He doesn't have an answer. He leans slightly into her gentle touch, peering down into her sparkling eyes.

"I worry for you, Draco."

"Why?" He wonders if she thinks him dense. He hardly does anything but belch up inane questions in her presence.

"You have so many difficult bits of your life. I don't want you to let them overtake you."

His parents are always on about the Dark Lord and his evil doings. They want Draco to abide by his desires to ensure their safety — every decision he makes is colored by Voldemort's influence over his family. No one has ever posited the idea to him that his life is his own.

He leans down to kiss his mudblood Herbology Professor with her grimy fingernails and too-short hair so suddenly that she squeals with surprise. He pulls away before she can otherwise react.

Draco loves her, if not only a little bit, and if not only for all of the wrong reasons. She's older and magically impure and not at all pretty and a former Hufflepuff and so it doesn't matter. He's forever swallowing his feelings anyway. He doesn't look at her shocked face, and instead falls to sit on the ground as the moon peaks out, and the flower blooms again.

Professor Sprout sits down beside him, placing her hand over his and leaning slightly against his side.

"You're a good boy, Draco."

Her lips touch his cheek, and somehow his mouth finds hers again; in the glow of the false starlight that emanates off of the flower he can be blind to the complications and to the fact that he loves the _idea_ of his professor and not Sprout herself, and he can half-forget that tomorrow he'll have to be big, bad, sneering Malfoy once more, and she'll likely never speak to him again.

But it's worth it for this one shining moment.


End file.
